A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material to which a claim of copyright protection is made. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction of any one of the patent documents or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but reserves all other rights whatsoever.
The present invention is directed to a production control system and to an associated method for interfacing automated material handling systems to manufacturing workcells.
The present invention is an integrator of computer controlled machines, operations personnel, and information systems.
There is a manufacturing trend toward "workcells" comprised of a group of related machinery and/or processes for automatically making a product. The machinery within a workcell may include discrete units such as, but not limited to, numerically controlled machines and robots; or continuous process machinery such as, but not limited to, etching process machinery or film developing process machinery. The machinery is operated under the control of a workcell computer. The computer generally is responsible for coordinating multiple workstations, machines or unit operations which have information processing capability and for tracking and otherwise managing materials. Within a workcell materials are automatically handled, fabricated and assembled into products.
One patent of particular interest for its general teachings is U.S. Pat. No. 4,698,766 entitled "Industrial Processing and Manufacturing Systems", by B. Entwistle et al. One system of the patent utilizes a controlling computer coupled to programmer selectable software modules that are interfaced to computer responsive hardware. Each software module is designed to carry out a particular element of the overall control functions with or without the assistance of the other modules. The system is operatively directed to an installation wherein a sequence of one or more items of work from each of a plurality of different kinds of activity is required.
A production control system that can be configured to select what system resources are required, what workcell resources are used and what user views into the workcell's operation are desired provides a system with a high degree of versatility.
The production control system of the present invention is configured to handle multilevel tasks via high level process scripts that are created through a configuration procedure incorporating a displayed menu tree.
Each workstation in the system is assigned a work-queue. The work-queues are served by one or more interpreters. The interpreters are responsive to the process script of the particular lot to be processed. A concurrency of activities takes place in parallel when the interpreters run in a multitasking fashion, using a job management capability of the present invention.
Process scripts and tables are configured interactively by an operator through the menu-based system.